Psychology 2220A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 9-13: Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Surface Roughness, Psychological Testing
2 May 2018
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Psychology test 3
Chapter 9: Language and Thinking
- Mental representations: includes images, ideas, concepts and principles
Language
- Language: a system of symbols and rules for organizing symbols in a way which convey meaning.
- Psycholinguistics: the psychological study of language
- Adaptive functions of language
o Brain achieved present form 50,000 years ago. Took 35,000 years for cave paintings to
develop. 12,000 years after that humans developed a means to store knowledge in the
form of writing
- Properties of language: are symbols, structure, meaning, and generativity
o Symbolic, structures
▪ Language uses a system of symbols and sounds to represent things, events,
ideas, and feelings
▪ Language has a rule governed structure
• Grammar: set of rules that dictate how symbols can be combined to
create meaningful units of communication
• Syntax: the rules that govern the order of words
o Meaning
▪ Semantics: the understanding of words and sentences.
o Displacement
▪ Language allows us to communicate about things that are not physically
present.
- Structure of language: language has a surface, a deep, and a hierarchal structure
o Surface structure and deep structure:
▪ Surface structure: consists of symbols that are used and their order
▪ Deep structure: underlying meaning of combined symbols
▪ Hierarchical structure:
• Phoneme: most elemental building block of the hierarchical structure. It
is the smallest unit of speech sound in a language that can signal a
difference in meaning (ex. In English we use a combination of vowel and
consonant sounds, African uses clicks)
• Morphemes: smallest units of meaning in a language. (ex. Dog, cat, pre-,
un-, de-,….
• Discourse: sentences combined into paragraph, articles, books, etc.
- Understanding and producing language:
o Bottom up processing: individual elements of a stimulus are analyzed and them
combined to form a recognizable perception
o Top down processing: sensory information is processed using existing knowledge,
concepts, ideas, and expectations
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▪ Speech segmentation: perceiving where each word within a spoken sentence
begins and ends. The availability of context makes identifying individual worlds
in a sentence much easier
o Pragmatics: social context to language.
▪ Pragmatics: a knowledge of the practical aspects of using language
▪ There are social rules that guide communication between people
o Language, functions, the brain, sex differences
▪ People ho hae daage to eithe oa’s o eike’s aea tend to duffer
from aphasia (an impairment of speech)
▪ Males are prone to more activation in the left hemisphere with language tasks,
whereas women tend to have activation on both hemispheres
- Acquiring a first language: many biologists believe that humans possess an inherent readiness to
recognize and produce language
o Biological foundations
▪ Between the ages of 6 and 12 months, a child will distinguish which sounds are
specific to their native tongue
▪ Language acquisition device (LAD): innate biological mechanism that contains
general grammatical rules common to all languages
o Social learning process
▪ Laguage auisitio suppot sstes LA““: fatos i oe’s soial
environment which facilitate the learning of a language
o Developmental timetable and sensitive periods
▪ There is a sensitive period between infancy and puberty in which the brain is
most sensitive to language input from the environment
- Bilingualism: learning a second language
o It is best to learn a second language during the sensitive period
o It has been shown that those who are bilingual perform better
o Bilingual children have more flexibility in their thinking
o Is learning a second language earlier better?
▪ Some findings support the earlier the better theory
▪ Another study found that people who started learning the language in their 20s
were also relatively fluent
▪ Overall the data suggests that there may be a sensitive (not critical) period for
learning a second language that extends through mid-adolescence
- Linguistic influences on thinking
o Whof’s Liguisti elatiit hpothesis: hpothesis that states that language influences
and determines what we are capable of thinking
o Asian languages facilitate mathematical skills because they operate on a base 10
method of thinking
Thinking
- Thought, Brain, and Mind
o Propositional thought: a thought that epesses a popositio I’ hug, it’s alost
time for dinner)
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o Imaginal thought: consists of images that we can see, hear, feel in our mind
o Motoric thought: mental representations of motor movements
- Concepts and propositions
o Propositions: statements that express ideas. Propositions are concepts arranged in a
particular way.
o Concepts: basic units of semantic memory, mental categories in which we place
activities, objects, and events that have certain features in common
o Prototypes: the most familiar member of a category or class. These most common
members define concepts
- Reasoning: helps eliminate the time consuming process of trial and error
o Deductive reasoning: reasoning from the top down
▪ General principles, assume universally true assess fit to specific instance
conclusion regarding specific individual case
o Inductive reasoning
▪ Collect factual information Evaluate facts Formulate general principle
o Factor preventing us from reasoning correctly
▪ Distraction by irrelevant information
▪ Belief bias: tendency to drop logical rules in exchange for our personal beliefs
▪ Emotions and framing: framing refers to how the information is presented
- Problem solving:
o there are 4 stages
▪ Understanding or framing the problem:
▪ Generating potential solutions: generate hypotheses or possible solutions
▪ Test the solutions
• Mental set: the tendency to stick to solutions that have worked in the
past
▪ Evaluate results
o Role of problem solving schemas: problem solving schemas are mental blueprints for
solving specific classes of problems
▪ Algorithms and heuristics
• Algorithms: formulas or procedures that automatically generate correct
solution
• Heuristics: more general problem solving strategies that can be applied
to certain classes of situations
• Means ends analysis: difference between present situation and desired
state or goal, we then make changes to reduce the difference
• Sub goal analysis: formulating intermediate steps towards a solution
o Uncertainty heuristics and decision making
▪ Representative heuristic: how something or someone fits our prototype of a
patiula oept o lass. ho likel is it that this peso, ojet, eet
represents that class
▪ Availably heuristic: cases us to base judgment on the availability of information
in memory
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Document Summary
Mental representations: includes images, ideas, concepts and principles. Language: a system of symbols and rules for organizing symbols in a way which convey meaning. Adaptive functions of language: brain achieved present form 50,000 years ago. Took 35,000 years for cave paintings to develop. 12,000 years after that humans developed a means to store knowledge in the form of writing. Properties of language: are symbols, structure, meaning, and generativity: symbolic, structures. Language uses a system of symbols and sounds to represent things, events, ideas, and feelings. Language allows us to communicate about things that are not physically present. It is the smallest unit of speech sound in a language that can signal a difference in meaning (ex. In english we use a combination of vowel and consonant sounds, african uses clicks: morphemes: smallest units of meaning in a language. (ex. Dog, cat, pre-, un-, de-, . (cid:895: discourse: sentences combined into paragraph, articles, books, etc.
